


Resplendence. Redemption.

by psychosomatic86



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Spoilers for ep 68, also gross abuse of italics bc, im really love John Hunger, pls save him Griffy, this is all just aesthetic catharsis lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 03:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11728860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychosomatic86/pseuds/psychosomatic86
Summary: So you're burning all your bridges;are you moving on again?Do you think you'll get to heaven;just by simply sneaking in?





	Resplendence. Redemption.

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally listened to Praying by Kesha and was looking at some Super Emotional art of cha-boy and that spurred me to write this self indulgent nonsense. Summary lyrics are another suitably apt song called The Father Complex by Many Rooms (10/10 would check it out), but Praying is the main song to this.
> 
> Just...
> 
> I just love John a lot and I want him to have a glorious redemption.

In the beginning, there are too many things for him to notice.

In the beginning, when the voracious power from his first feeding wrenches apart a million pupils and blinks their better eyes into gouging _white_ amidst his pulsating darkness newly freckled with speckles of the assimilation…

He just…

Doesn’t notice.

And his vigilance continues to grow smug and bloated as his body as he swallows worlds whole and scatters their pieces to his peripheries, pushing his ascendence beyond comprehension.

Beyond, at least, to those who first witness him.

But they soon understand.

And they love it.

And they feast in celebration.

And he continues his failure to notice.

He almost does, those times when his quarry eludes him and, instead of gorging his glory, he must pursue the ignorant wretches that refuse to relinquish to _his_ light.

He _almost_ does when the eyes shift impatiently around him, squinting at each other and scrutinizing him with impassive impatience. He assures them they will feed soon enough.

Next time.

And the eyes chitter amongst themselves with bitter gossip, skitter and pace agitatedly through the swells of _orangegreenblueyellowpurplered_. It only just unnerves him, because he knows he will not fail next time.

Until next time yawns for decades.

And rifts of skeletal ribs and knobby knees and sunken, shadowed _eyes_ begin to infect his _Starving_.

And it all turns to glower at him, stringing him up in sterile webs fury, puppeting him through the planes in search of _light_.

He tries to appease them.

Talks sweet as salvation like he did that very first time his congregation coalesced and worshipped him as God.

But the eyes are unhinged. They don’t _believe_ anymore.

They don’t _care_.

They are too hungry.

And, finally, he notices.

In the beginning, when mutiny first binds him toe to fingertip, he sees how utterly _lacking_ his light is.

The cords they’ve sutured his joints with, embroidered around his pupils to pull them wide enough to burst so all of his squandered resplendence can scorch his mind…

It is nothing - _has_ nothing, is merely an insubstantial mockery of something so much _better_.

But the colors soon find him.

_They_ are unbearable.

When the first one (orange - a comet’s tail streak across his collarbone) squirms up through his skin like a crystalline parasite, shredding him apart with thick, meaty _tears_ …

It isn’t the sunbursts or storytelling fires or sweet fruits he’s snuffed out so many times prior.

It isn’t the tang of ice on a hot day or swirling, cultural dances, or forges billowing masterful metalworks.

It’s a desert’s brittle dehydration sucking every droplet of moisture from his lungs.

It’s the puckering of diseased skin, flaking and bloody and incurable.

It’s famine starting at the roots of crops soon to perish from blight and curse.

Green worms next ‘round his wrists, but not as lush trees glowing virescent against the backdrop of a roiling thunderstorm.

Nor as a kitten’s eyes first opened to peer at a world new and promising and playful.

It is the sequin shimmers bejeweling a snake coiled unseen and poised to strike.

It is the lurch of a sore stomach, unable to relieve itself of toxins.

It is the cloud of strange chemicals released in the oceans of blue splintering open his left eye.

And these oceans are thick with tar and the taste of metal between his teeth, with black, burnt frost claiming his limbs one by one _coloring_ them to purple.

And the purple turns to ink, carving into his quaking ledger these maps of crooked pathways spidering over his back, opening diaphanous bruises that leak yellow pus and fever from his palms - fever that kills at birth but hasn’t quite killed _him_.

And the red - rushing, rusty - is last.

The red - rushing, _rusted_ \- gushes as his blood, felling the iron city of his skeleton that has stood for more than a _century_.

These truths he bastardized to suit the one he so dutifully believed un-seam him from inside to out. But really there is neither here nor there in this maelstrom he composed - no escape or _chance_.

There is only inevitability, and he almost succumbs to it until he remembers.

And he _shrieks_ , not aloud, but somewhere inside where it hasn’t quite poisoned him - somewhere he holds the memory of a word he once scorned now _clings_ to like a dying man would a life preserver.

With apprehension at first, then with unyielding devotion as his fate cinctures with a child’s imprecise hand the colorful noose ‘round his neck.

And as the scribbled rents are drawn to be closed, suddenly he is displaced.

And he sees him.

The dwarf, Merle.

His _friend_.

It’s this word he howls into the technicolor darkness to initiate parlay - that unsettling syllable Merle struck him with so many years ago. The dwarf’s tone had been entirely innocuous when he asked the question, but as he’s pulled from the only embrace he’s ever felt and into the swimming, marble floor, as his mouth fills with silence and his heart beaten into stillness, he suddenly remembers every lilt of his friend’s cadence, the innocence and _hope_ it held.

And then, for a long, long time, he doesn’t remember anything.

He can’t.

There is agony and torture and rage and _horror_ , but he only experiences it. There is no permanence.

And in such a state of stasis, he doesn’t notice at first. With nothing to engage him beyond the split second of _experience_ , he doesn’t bother to struggle anymore and so he just…

Doesn’t notice.

And his vigilance continues to wane past the point of decay as he shrivels into shivers, pieces of him scattered to ash at the edge of his existence until he is almost engulfed by his own nothingness.

Almost.

Until he has almost _succumbed_.

_A l m o s t_

 

 

*

 

 

 

Death never scared him.

The threats of heavens and hells and in betweens and beyonds and withins didn’t faze him all too much. When people came preaching about white lights and brimstone and purgatory, he listened without absorbing and left them ranting on street corners or in those gaudy temples that never paid taxes.

Funnily enough, these worshippers were the first to fall at his feet and pledge loyalty, and he just couldn’t bring himself to discriminate, so they preyed all together, wreaking vengeance on law and constraint until he could claim himself the redeemer.

Death never scared him.

It still doesn’t.

He’s been dead for over a century, so he knows what comes after.

He knows there _is_ an after.

He knows _his_ after.

It’s the _beyond_ that renders the last vestiges of his preservation null.

He knows it exists, and, when the Hunger has masticated his miseries to pulp, it’s where it will spit him out.

But he doesn’t know _where_.

What it will look like.

Sound like.

Suspended now in nothing at all, he can’t fathom a _beyond_ of _now_.

For all his searching and plundering and swallowing of _everything_ , this knowledge forever flirted with him, but he could never grasp it.

Perhaps it is because no one has become as he had and so the answer never needed to exist at all. If there is no catalyst, there need be no reaction.

Then he boasted himself an outlier in the equation of reality and everything began to unravel, existence scrambling to rewrite an answer.

He is so very soon to know it - be the first of any to glimpse a result that was never meant. He destroyed logic, and he alone will reap the repercussions.

And they come.

_He feels it, a relieved shudder quavering through the whole of his captors’ bodies._

And they are coming.

_A percussion of punishment._

And they are coming for him.

_His crucifixion._

And at first.

He doesn’t…

Well.

_You_ know.

And then… so does he.

_He feels it, a defeated cadence carving out the whole of his captor’s body._

And they are coming.

_The Saviors._

And they are coming for _him_.

And they?

Well, we _all_ know.

_They_ are a symphony of Light.


End file.
